Quitting Is A Journey – A Very Long Journey

So, quitting is a journey? A journey that is pretty darn long? Yes, it is! I think that a lot of smokers who want to quit fail to realize that successful smoking cessation is something that is done over a long period of time. And by a long period of time I am talking about your whole entire life. This is why so many smokers fail to be quitters in the first place. A smoker who thinks that quitting can be done with some sort of magic aid and denies the fact that they are going to really have to work at it, is a smoker that has set themselves up for failure.

The truth is that stop smoking aids can help tremendously with the process of quitting and can even make the process a whole lot easier, but it does not mean that a stop smoking aid will totally eliminate the work that needs to be done – the work a smoker must put in in order to abolish their addiction.  Likewise, there are no magic techniques or tips that can take the responsibility off of a smoker when it comes to doing their part in warding off addiction and cravings.

Quitting smoking is a journey. It is a journey that requires continuous effort and a journey that never really ends. Yes, it is very much possible to quit cigarettes. The point of this post isn’t to dissuade you from trying to quit cigarettes and to make you think that quitting successfully is absolutely impossible. Rather, the point of this post is to get you to realize that the process of quitting isn’t something that can zapped away and is something that you must always work at. What I mean by always working at it is that you are always going to need to push yourself mentally to fight off and deal with cravings. Cravings do get better over time but they will most likely never go away. So, if you are able to let a craving pass with willpower and focus then you’ll be just fine. Just know that it will require effort. Now, go start (not) smoking!

Nicotine is a highly addictive drug which is naturally occurring in tobacco. There isn’t tobacco without nicotine which means that there is no cigarette without nicotine. If a cigarette didn’t have nicotine then it wouldn’t be a cigarette at all. This powerful drug creates an addictive habit by producing pleasant feelings to the brain and subsequently, the smoker. In order to maintain this level of “pleasantness” a smoker must continue smoking. Basically, the nicotine presents a new smoker with “pleasant” feelings and this person continues to smoke because they enjoy what they feel as they smoke a cigarette. As the person continues smoking the feelings become normal to them. The feelings associated with nicotine consumption are no longer pleasant but rather mandatory. And this is where the real addiction begins. Since the person has become accustomed to these feelings, they now feel the need to continue smoking. If they don’t smoke then they don’t feel normal and as a result the brain tells them that they absolutely need more nicotine.

The addiction only gets worse as the smoker continues to smoke and fuel there nicotine addiction. In most cases the smoker will develop a tolerance for nicotine. What this means is that in addition to needing nicotine in the first place in order to feel normal, the smoker will need more and more nicotine in order to feel that level of normalcy. The smoker will start to feel cravings even as they smoke if they do not up the amount of cigarettes that they are smoking daily. This is why cigarette addiction is such a vicious cycle. Someone new to smoke is pulled in and then thrown into the daily habit of maintaining nicotine consumption in order to feel normal.